00:00The light-bending gravity of a black hole needs no introduction, but have you ever wondered what would happen if two black holes got thrown together?
00:13NASA has released a visualization of two supermassive black holes locked in a binary orbit.
00:19The simulation, made by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA's Guttered Space Flight Center, shows how each black hole, millions of times bigger than the sun, distorts light emitting from the other's accretion disk, the hot gas surrounding it.
00:36The colors aren't just for show. The gas around smaller black holes would most likely be hotter and emit light near the blue end of the spectrum.
00:46The extreme gravity distorts the light coming from different parts of the disks, resulting in a warped image.
00:53According to Schnittman, zooming into each black hole reveals multiple increasingly distorted images of its partner.
01:01Schnittman used NASA's Discover supercomputer to make the simulation, since the calculations needed would have taken a modern desktop computer about 10 years.
